So I find myself netflicking again the other night, looking for something to rest my weary eyes on after another long day spent reading and writing on that radiant little iPad of mine. Ah, here we go then, a new one of those geriatric menaces with Liam Neeson in it. This time he’s to be a hit man (what else) retired in a village full of innocents the producer seems to have borrowed from the Banshees of Inisherin. It does also have Ciarán Hinds and Colm Meaney in it, though, so maybe….
Turns out it’s quite satisfying—serious enough to portray a character who has as hard a time as any of us figuring out if it’s his death or his life catching up with him, and wise enough to cast a superb Kerry Condon as the young harridan with a revolver who helps him with the final bit of calculation. It’s not quite Inisherin, but it doesn’t embarrass itself.
It’s called In the Land of Saints and Sinners, and it’s on Prime. It wouldn‘t kill you to have a look at it.
The DNC wants to know how it happened, by which they mean how it happened to them. Someone—I no longer remember who—once said that after 1968, the Democratic Party finally succeeded in locking its entire left wing in a windowless room, then spent the next 40 years booby trapping all the exits. Ironically, it was a Democrat who once told us that those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. He was another kind of Democrat, though, and anyway he was talking about somebody else.
Nancy Pelosi thinks it happened because men in her party aren’t cunning enough. She may be on to something.
Joe Biden thinks it happened because the Democratic Party wasn’t Joe Biden enough. Enough said about that.
AOC tried everything she could think of to keep it from happening, including reluctantly acting the part of a loyal apparatchik in party conferences. To no avail, as is now clear even to her.
David Frum says he knows how it happened, but rather unconvincingly ignores the fact that he was in the room when it was being planned.
Donald Trump thinks it happened because he’s the bonfire of all the vanities. Not quite all the vanities, though, as will soon become abundantly clear.
Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it happened because stupid is not only stronger than smart, it’s also more patient. She’s wrong, yet on the scale of a single human lifetime, it’s gonna be impossible to prove to her or to anyone else exactly how wrong she is.
How do I think it happened? You don’t want to know.
The sarabande from Bach’s cello suite no. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008, was my first glimpse into the one abyss that human beings can always look into with confidence that their eternal immaturity will be respected. Music is the abyss that looks back into us without any attempt to claim dominion over us, the abyss that offers us a rare chance to defeat entropy. Music isn’t always destined to soothe the savage beast in us—every once in a while it escapes the definitions we’ve reserved for it and confirms the fundamental savagery of our right to exist in a universe filled with marvels that otherwise might remain beyond us in every way.
58 years ago a twenty year-old Mike Davis taught me to love LA. Even then he was a sharply critical lover of that magical place, so I’m not sure how it was that, despite his tutelage, my love for LA came to be so much less critical than his. Like Randy Newman, I loved LA without reservation, and kept loving it even when, roughly 25 years after I last saw Mike, I found myself reading my library’s copy of City of Quartz and nodding along in agreement as I followed his historical analysis of what I’d long since thought of as his city far more legitimately than it had been mine.
These days, I live in Arizona, feeling much more exile than expatriate, even on my good days, for reasons anyone who’s spent any time in Dogtown will understand. I’ve long wanted to thank Mike publicly for his exuberant gift to my younger self, but not having the patience to write memoirs, and being temperamentally unsuited to the writing of eulogies, I never got around to it while he was alive, and couldn’t bring myself to commit to it in the days after he passed, as surfing on his hard-earned fame as a public intellectual seemed a rotten way to honor his memory.
So let me do this instead: For anyone who lives in LA for any length of time, and responds to it as I did, memory becomes a sort of protean creature, one which with or without their consent claims a small but significant share of their consciousness. One can never tell for sure whether what one remembers is something lived in the flesh, experienced vicariously in a darkened movie theater, or simply appears unbidden as an inexplicably alchemical fusing of the two.
This, then, is the introduction to a series of small, but haunted Los Angeles memories that have affected me more deeply over time than I had any reason to expect when they first came to me. They’re personal, of course, not necessarily having any significance for anyone but me, but I offer them here for any others who may find them resonant—you’ll know who you are. Above all, though, they’re my thanks to the Mike I still remember from those long ago days when we were both impossibly young, who long before he had any thought of leaving the life he lived so furiously, gifted me with this oddly Southern California capacity for double vision that I’ve treasured ever since.
Frank Herbert’s Dune seems to have been written by a man who’d read too much Gibbon. Max’s DUNE Prophecy, on the other hand, seems to have been created by people who’ve watched too much TikTok.
Viewed from a certain critical perspective, both are satirical masterpieces, and like all such masterpieces, feel eerily appropriate to their times.
Trans people are people. …endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights… and so forth and so on —248 years into our grand collective experiment even you should have learned the fucking drill….
Whenever I read about our new capitalist overlords gutting each other over who gets to profit from the rabbit-out-of-a-hat tricks of large language models, I have to laugh. Here are a handful of quotes that will give you some idea why:
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I don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.
—@kat@weatherishappening.network, from a Mastodon thread about ChatGPT
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Und so wie gesellschaftliche und technische Entwicklungen zuvor die Unantastbarkeit Gottes in Zweifel zogen, so stellen sie nun die„Sakralisierung” des Menschen zur Disposition.
And just as social and technical developments once cast doubt on the sanctity of God, so they now subject the sacralization of humanity to renegotiation.
—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)
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Der tiefere Sinn der Singularity-These ist die technische Überwindung kultureller Pluralität.
The deeper meaning of the singularity-thesis is the triumph of technology over cultural plurality.
—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)
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Die Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.
The Enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its self-inflicted immaturity.
—Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung
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Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.
Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full—
fellmonger Death gets every skin.
All that is piteous, all that’s fair,
all that is fat and scant of breath,
Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,
is Death’s collateral:
—Basil Bunting, Villon
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Say what you will, it’s clear to me that the Pax Americana, and more generally humanism itself, with all its honorable striving, are both well and truly done. Contemplating what passes for virtue and wisdom among those so obviously eager to feast on the leftovers would make even the gods laugh.
Seeing behind the curtain isn’t easy for children, the poor, the otherwise marginalized. They simply lack the necessary resources. Recognizing that the curtain is there, though, is the first step toward liberation.
Despite its birth in slavery and genocide, there was always some hope that the United States would one day live up to the aspirations of its founders rather than continue to turn a blind eye to the evils inherent in some of their political compromises. Even when we were certain we wouldn’t live to see that day, we had reasons not to feel like fools when looking forward to its eventual arrival.
Today, as Trump and his sycophants begin gleefully making plans to burn our books and chisel our names off the nation’s monuments, we should take a moment to remind ourselves what will inevitably become of them once their political orgasm has spent itself. Winning won’t magically make them any less ignorant, any more capable of coping with anything more complex than their own appetites for self-aggrandisement. While they’re busy gloating, grifting, and genuflecting to their preposterous version of the Christian god, the Chinese or Russians may very well show up to eat the lunch so cluelessly laid out for them, or what is even more likely, climate change may finally turn Arizona into hell with the fire out, and blow down or drown everything in Florida from Mar-a-Lago to Tallahassee.
In the meantime, we should mind how we go. Remember that they don’t own the future—many of their children will come to hate them soon enough, especially their daughters. Ignore the taunts, save the bullied wherever and whenever we can, and never, ever forego an opportunity to pour a cup of virtual sugar into a coal-roller’s gas tank.
Part Two has been in progress for a painfully long time, but the future is proving to be an even more elusive beast than I thought when I first began this somewhat speculative apologia.
In its issue of April 4, 1994, the New Yorker published an article by Nicholson Baker, Discards, which called into serious question what he was convinced was an unwise rush by libraries to replace traditional card catalogs with a computer-based approach to information access and retrieval. Baker’s article was widely read in academic library circles, not only because it was critical of the work librarians were doing, but also because it had appeared in the New Yorker. Specialists working in fields as obscure as technical librarianship aren’t normally accustomed to reading such critical assessments of their work from outside the profession, especially when those assessments turn out to be as accurate in their details, and as forthright in their judgments as Discards was about our bibliographical stewardship.
When I first took up Baker’s article that April, I admit I found myself wishing that it hadn’t been quite so accurate, or quite so forthright, and for good reason. At the time, I was employed in the Cataloging Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara Library, where for the preceding ten years I’d been supervising the work of something called the Catalog Maintenance and Retrospective Conversion Section.
Catalog maintenance, the section’s traditional responsibility, meant managing the card catalog—adding new cards to the drawers as new books arrived and were cataloged, correcting errors in the existing cards, and updating them to reflect revised entries whenever the Library of Congress made changes to its subject thesaurus, or altered its preferred form of an author’s or editor’s name.
The retrospective conversion assignment had been added in the mid-1980s, at the point when all current cataloging was finally being done on our new computer system. To complete the transition from a card-based catalog to a computer-based one, we were tasked with entering the older, manually-produced contents of the card catalog into our digital cataloging database. Once that nearly decade-long task was complete, we discarded both the cards—some 10 million of them—and the cabinets which had housed them, and replaced them with public access computer terminals. Access to the new digital catalog could be provided first on dedicated terminals within any library in the University of California system, and then, after a surprisingly short interval, to anyone anywhere in the world who had UC library privileges, an Internet connection, and a Web browser.
That was what retrospective conversion meant and what it did, and that was precisely the activity, carried out by my section from the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties, and repeated in libraries all over the world, which had given rise to Baker’s article. He thought that what we were doing was not only short-sighted, but barbarous—an offense against civilization itself—and was saying so in no uncertain terms.
Despite his obviously careful research, his passionate indictment of our project—in the pages of the New Yorker, no less—struck me at the time as being perverse, perverse in the sense that he seemed much more determined to condemn us for what he believed we were destroying than to evaluate what we believed we were creating, or our success in creating it. In Bakers’s view, it seemed, far from being the responsible stewards of the world’s intellectual patrimony we’d imagined ourselves to be, we were in fact vandals, the moral equivalent of those universally despised vandals who’d once set fire to the Library of Alexandria. Was this a fair judgment? I certainly didn’t think so, but just as I was deciding that the situation was unprecedented enough, and the outcome uncertain enough, not to take his judgment personally, on the very last page of Discards, I encountered this:
(U.C.S.B., incidentally, finished throwing out its main catalogue late last summer.)
Incidentally. Certainly not a word that I’d have chosen. UCSB was my library, throwing out its catalog was my job, and I could have told him, had he asked me, that there was nothing incidental about it. Arguments about intent, though, were apparently beside the point. What concerned Baker was not intent, but consequences, consequences which he was far more certain about than we were. I put down my copy of the New Yorker and recalled the end of Dr. Frankenstein’s career. Was I really a vandal? Would there be a mob of concerned citizens with pitchforks and torches waiting for me in the library parking lot after work?
Given that Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist in 1994, I really didn’t have anything to worry about. An indictment and trial of supposedly philistine librarians in the court of a public opinion generally indifferent to abstract policy squabbles was highly unlikely. Yet if Baker’s attempt at framing a public policy indictment of our work seemed perverse to me, his instinct that some sort of public policy questioning should be taking place was valid enough to be taken seriously. Indifferent or not, the public was clearly going to be affected by the technologies of the coming digital age, not just affected, but shaped by them. The disappearance of card catalogs from their libraries was, if anything, merely the thin edge of the coming wedge.
Thirty years later, deep into the age of Amazon, Google, and Wikipedia, of LLM, ChatGPT, Simon and Bard, it’s hard to recall precisely what form my testimony might have taken in the event that Baker and the New Yorker had actually succeeded in putting us all on trial. All I can remember now with any precision is my certainty that printed books were already becoming an anachronism, that libraries were already in the process of becoming museums of the printed word, and that librarians would have little future except as their curators. All of this, I was convinced, would happen sooner than even Nicholson Baker feared, and would turn out in the end to be even more radically disruptive than many of my colleagues, committed as they imagined themselves to be to our digital future, could bring themselves to admit.
I haven’t spent more than an hour or so in the UCSB library—nor any other library—since I retired in late 2003, nor have I kept up with library journals, or the professional literature in general. As a consequence, I have only the vaguest of notions what, if anything, has changed in the intervening twenty years in the mission of libraries and librarians as viewed by librarians themselves. I can’t imagine that they still think of themselves as principal actors in the digital transformation of information storage and access, but I do hope that they’ve remained principled stewards of the triumphs of the past, and skeptical about some of the more outrageous claims made those who are now in charge of the digital transformations of the 21st century. In any event, what happens now in libraries is no longer mine to judge. If there’s a problem, I’m willing to concede that I had a part in creating it. If there’s to be a solution, I’m well aware that I won’t have any part in devising it.
